To Boldly Go

William Shatner’s unmistakable voice opens the original Star Trek series.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!

A lot of debate went into these words. Ultimately, Gene Roddenberry made the final call, and “to boldly go” was immortalized and syndicated.

To boldly split an infinitive is more like it, am I right?!?

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself… but shouldn’t it be to go boldly? How about boldly to go? But both of those sound awful.

This is a great example of linguistic drift: when the meaning of a word or phrase changes over time. Sometimes what’s considered proper grammar can drift, too, and that’s what has happened here.

When I grew up, this rule about split infinitives was still being taught in school. We learned to never split up a verb phrase that had “to” at its start.

Did you notice that I just did the thing I said we weren’t supposed to do?

If you didn’t notice it, that’s because this is how normal people talk nowadays. It sounded normal to most people in 1966, too, when Shatner recorded those iconic lines, although more older people probably shuddered back then when they heard the split infinitive.

To be clear, this is an example of a split infinitive, and it is also correct grammar. Saying “to boldly go” only serves to emphasize the boldness of the act of going somewhere unknown. Today, this rule is viewed as unnecessary and arbitrary, and it has been dropped from most grammar and style guides.

Is it any wonder that Captain Kirk has been selected to be the voice of the show during the opening credits? For starters, he’s the leader of the ship and probably the main star of the show, but there’s more, too: Kirk represents the adventurism of the show.

Kirk is reckless, and will sometimes defy logic in taking risks. Now, I really, really don’t advocate this approach in real life! I like logic a lot, and I think it’s possible to take properly calculated risks on a logical basis. Be logical, and take risks only when they make sense.

With that being said, Kirk’s recklessness might not serve an actual Star Ship Enterprise very well in deep space, but it served the show incredibly well. Kirk’s shenanigans would sometimes get the crew into trouble, and his bold risk-taking would sometimes get them out of said trouble.

Spock, on the other hand, is sort of like a grammar Nazi. Can you imagine Leonard Nimoy’s logical voice violating an age-old convention of grammar?

In this case, language has to meet the needs of the people speaking it. Kirk is our dude, because he will just say whatever sounds right. Spock gets too caught up in the underlying structure of the language, he sometimes goes too far in enforcing grammar rules, so he makes communication more difficult.

The way I see it, the important thing about language is how clearly a message can be conveyed. We do need an underlying structure with rules we all agree to use, but those rules should reflect whatever results in making communication easier.

We must boldly split infinitives whenever we notice that that’s how normal people sound when they talk. We are the ones who are going to carve out tomorrow’s grammar rules.